Redditor Sen_Mendoza posted a GIF that shows how dramatically the U.S. prison population changed after President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs in the 1970s.

Check it out:

The prison population across the U.S. starts off relatively low in the late 1970s, with most states having about 130 to 260 prisoners per 100,000 people.

By the late 1990s, incarceration rates have risen to more than 600 prisoners per 100,000 people in some states, including Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. By the 2000s, every state in America had seen its imprisonment rate rise significantly.

The prisoners included in the statistics are under state or federal jurisdiction and have a sentence of more than one year.

The War on Drugs, which led to long prison sentences for drug offenders, is largely considered a massive failure that led to prison overcrowding without significantly changing U.S. drug abuse rates.

Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.